Removing & redirecting old pages

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

In the case of an e-commerce store

when you remove/delete an old sub department page because you no longer sell the products that page was for

can you/should you redirect it to its parent main category/dept page first or just delete and let become a 404 ?

Being a sub department it  is obviously closely related to the main category/dept but seem strange to 301 it since its not really moved permanently to that page but i hear that's what people do to transfer that pages authority before deleting it so its not lost

cheers

dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Ray !!

[Ray-pp]

If the sub department has authority that you'd like to retain, 301 the department to its closest parent.

From a usability stance, this makes sense. If a visitor came to your site for that content and finds it no longer there, it is better to redirect them to the closest related content rather than showing them a simple error page and not guiding them to a better area of the site.